Bedouins of the Empty Quarter

Donald Powell Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351314626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume describes Bedouins, a tribal pastoral people in eastern Saudia Arabia. This volume documents changes in their way of life, beginning in the 1930s and continuing to the 1960s, when this book originally appeared. The Empty Quarter described here is a place inhabited by a people so thoroughly devoted to their pastoral pursuits that they are referred to as nomads of the nomads. To the Al Murrah and other camel-keeping pastoralists, theirs is a rich and rewarding life. For either to survive, men and camels must live in close symbiosis. The camels provide food, fiber, and transport; man provides knowledge of available resources, of which the most precious are water and the grasses that grow where rains have fallen. In this work, Donald Powell Cole shows us that this existence more complex and intricate. There is the complex knowledge of the desert itself, its varieties, moods, and resources. Next, there is the knowledge of the camels, their needs, capacities, and the peculiarities of each animal. These different kinds of knowledge must be brought together to fully use, yet carefully conserve, scarce resources. As important is the structuring of social life. The tribesmen must have a flexible social system that enables the individual household to operate alone when the environmental situation requires. This necessitates a pattern of independence and equality. The Al Murrah live according to ancient traditions, but life is not unchanging. In 1932, Saudi Arabia became a nation and intertribal raiding and warfare was brought to an end. Cole highlights the adaptability of the Al Murrah as the desert became increasingly invaded by motor transport and oil rigs. He sees their experience as prototypical: man everywhere must attune his life to the requirements of his economy. In a place like the Arabian Desert these adjustments are most insistent. This work shows that even when these demands of the external world pervade behavior, life can remain rich and rewarding.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In late September 1968 after receiving permission from the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I traveled to the headquarters of the amir of the Āl Murrah Bedouin tribe in an abandoned worker’s barracks near the oil processing plant at Abquaiq, a town in eastern Saudi Arabia. The amir, Talib ibn Rashid ibn Shoraim al-Marri, doubles as paramount chief of the Āl Murrah and as head of a unit of the Saudi Arabian Reserve National Guard of which most of the members are from the Āl Murrah tribe.

I was hospitably welcomed by the amir, his sons, and his father’s brother’s sons and during the following days introduced to scores of tribesmen who had come to perform their monthly duties in the National Guard and to collect their salaries. The amir and his eldest son, Rashid, took pains to teach me the genealogy of the Āl Murrah and to tell me something of their history. Most of the other men spontaneously told me the names of the fakhds, or lineages, from which they came, as well as the names of other kinship groupings, all of which they would ask me to repeat. I was exhilarated by the open, straightforward, friendly manner in which these men presented themselves. They always seemed to be laughing and playing jokes on each other and on me.

Their friendly gregariousness was in contrast to descriptions I had read and heard of Saudi Arabian Bedouin as dour fanatics who, with their long hair and daggers, are barbarians who appreciate few of the finer things of life. It also contrasted with descriptions of the desert region the Āl Murrah inhabit, the Rub’ al-Khali (the Empty Quarter), as a barren land of madness and death. These Āl Murrah always said, “In the Rub’ al-Khali you will find everything: the best camels, plenty of good camel’s milk, lots of hunting, clean sand and fresh air, and only one’s brothers—everything.” Throughout the eighteen months I lived with them, I never thought of them as barbaric or fanatical. Rather, a feeling of what I would call aristocratic simplicity was continuously confirmed by their actions and their talk. They reject the city as physically and socially polluted and prefer the desert where they can live what they habitually describe as a pure and clean life. Their rejection of the security of sedentary life is coupled with an adherence to an austere practice of Islam as taught by the strict Handbali Sunnites and a high valuation of the ways of the Arabs—of being generous and dispensing hospitality, of seeking revenge when wronged, and of marrying only people of one’s kind.

But these people, content to keep to themselves and to exploit an ecological niche that has provided them with a relatively high level of subsistence within traditional Arabia, are now being faced with what may well be a life or death struggle for survival. What is in question does not concern so much the physical life of individual beings but whether their society, their culture, and their way of life, have a place—even in some modified form—in modern Saudi Arabia.

The world’s richest known oil fields lie in eastern Saudi Arabia and its brother states that bound the Arabian Gulf. Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938; its most rapid exploitation began after World War II; revenues rose from $5 million in 1950 to nearly $1 billion in 1968 and to over $3 billion in 1973. Into this area, the cradle of the desert Arabs and of Islam itself, have gushed the consumer products of both Western and Eastern industrial economies. Trucks, cars, and airplanes have replaced camels, which had been the only means of transportation within the lifetime of people no older than thirty. Within the past ten years, the old labyrinthine mud-brick cities have felt the tread of the bulldozer opening up broad, straight thoroughfares and are crumbling as the old houses are abandoned for modern air-conditioned villas in the suburbs or high-rise apartment buildings.

The cities have changed tremendously and are today booming with new schools and universities, with hospitals, with commercial establishments selling products from most of the industrial world, and with paved streets and broad avenues that extend for miles around the sprawling cities of Riyadh and Jeddah. To the cities and oil camps has also come a large migration of Lebanese, Palestinian, and Egyptian middle-class people, of workers from the poorer and more traditional areas of the Yemen, Hadhramaut, and Oman, and of European, North American, Pakistani, and Japanese advisers, technicians, skilled laborers, and company managers.

The towns and cities have changed more than the villages or the desert but the delicate balance between the desert and the sown, between nomadic pastoralist and sedentary farmer, has been destroyed. The majority of the nomads, probably twenty per cent of an estimated total population of eight million, continue to herd animals in the desert and to provide for their basic subsistence, but more and more of their youth are leaving the tents and the herds to seek jobs as wage laborers in the cities and oil camps. Many are staying on, bringing their wives and children, and settling down to a life as members of a wage-earning proletariat rather than as independent tribespeople.

The future of nomadism is thus uncertain. Certainly they are already changing, but is nomadic pastoralism itself altogether doomed in contemporary Saudi Arabia? Why is it cheaper and easier to import frozen mutton from Argentina and New Zealand than to use national products? Do not the deserts of Arabia still bloom and provide the grazing lands that used to allow the export of large numbers of camels, sheep, and goats throughout the Levant and to Egypt and India? Cannot the exploitation of these lands be made to contribute to the rapidly developing cash-oriented economy? These are questions we seek to answer in the latter part of this book, but they should be kept in the back of the reader’s mind throughout, for they form part of the reality nomads face in today’s Arabia.

Before attempting to analyze the changes faced by nomads in Saudi Arabia, and indeed in much of the rest of the Arab world, let us turn first to a discussion of nomadic pastoralism in Arabia in its more traditional aspects. The Bedouin of Arabia have always represented only part of the total population of the area. Despite the myths of many of the sedentary people who claim to have descended from nomads, most desert people have probably always been villagers living in oases. The nomads, however, are the ones who capture the attention of travelers and who have provided much of the ethos of traditional Arabia as a whole.

In this book, we turn our attention to the nomads not because they represented an idealized and romanticized version of the “true Arab,” but because we are interested in seeing how they manage to live in an environment that most people regard as more than merely inhospitable—as a land of madness and death incapable of supporting human life. They are highly skilled specialists enjoying a relatively comfortable life in a harsh environment. How do they do it?

The perspective we take is ecological. How is the social structure and culture of the Bedouins adapted to their life as nomadic pastoralists? Especially, what kinds of social groups exist within their society and how do these provide an organizational framework for the exploitation of their environment? How is the process of fission and fusion of social units, of contracting and expanding, that is so much a part of the dynamics of Bedouin social organization related to seasonal changes and to the needs of their animals? How does their desert habitation and their intimate association with animals affect their religious and symbolic life? And how are all these aspects of their life interrelated to form a coherent whole that until recently has been transmitted from generation to generation almost without change?

Nomadic Pastoralism in the Middle East

The primarily Islamic lands of Southwest Asia and North Africa, commonly referred to as the Middle East, display a number of physical characteristics that favor the combination of sedentary agriculture and nomadic pastoralism. Rainfall is generally low and almost nowhere reaches the 40- to 50-inch yearly levels that are characteristic of the eastern United States, western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China. Only a few coastal and mountain areas receive as much as 20 inches per year, which is equal to the drier parts of Spain. Rainfall in the rest of the area varies from less than 1 inch per year in the central Sahara Desert and southern Egypt to 4 inches in the deserts of southern Arabia and to as much as 8 inches in northern Arabia and the Syrian Desert.

Although agriculture is severely limited to less than 10 percent of the total land mass because of lack of water, some of the world’s most famous agrarian states and empires have been located in this area. Most of the crops and animals that we in the West know and use today were first domesticated here during the early period of the Agricultural Revolution, at least 10,000 years ago. Agriculture, of course, has been highly concentrated in a few areas that can be irrigated. The valleys of the famous river systems of the Middle East, most notably the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile, have known large scale irrigation projects since at least 7,500 B.P. and are associated not only with highly intensive agriculture but with the development of urban living and the division of society into a number of different economic specializations. The state, as an institution, also had its earliest development in these agricultural centers of the Middle East.

The emergence of pastoralism as a specialized form of activity dates from the same period as the emergence of agriculture in the Middle East. Archaeological evidence presents us with a picture of agriculture and pastoralism developing more or less concomitantly and in close symbiotic relationship. Equally early dates are found for both animal and plant domesticants, which suggests a general regionwide process of cultural and ecological change. Over 10,000 years ago when hunter-gatherers first began the process of selective harvesting and of seed planting that led to increased yields and the onset of sedentary village life, they also began to control the movements of herds of wild sheep and goats to keep them permanently on the margins of grain fields. Some of these animals were captured, penned, and domesticated. As agriculture continued to develop and population densities increased, more economic specializations emerged. Eventually, full-time herders appeared, especially as they began to exploit pasture areas further removed from the centers of cultivation.

Nomadic pastoralism is thus not a holdover of the hunter-gatherer way of life of our paleolithic ancestors. Unlike the wild animals on which hunter-gatherers depend and over which they have little, if any, control, the domesticated animals of pastoralists have been brought under their cultural control and are dependent on their human herders for survival. Nomadic pastoralism represents an attempt on the part of Middle Eastern peoples to utilize areas that are not conducive to agriculture but which provide the potential for high returns through the rational pasturing of animals by skilled herders.

Although agriculture is limited to less than 10 percent of the area, the rest of the land mass is by no means totally devoid of plant life. Indeed, excellent natural pasture areas abound with a large variety of perennial and annual plants. But seldom do climatic conditions provide the potential for sedentary pastoralism as in modern ranching. Pasture areas are limited and the only means of exploiting them is through seasonal migrations from one to another.

In some areas of the Middle East, the juxtaposition of two ecological zones that are complementary to each other on a seasonal basis encourages nomadic pastoralism. In western and southwestern Iran, for example, the Zagros Mountains annually receive large quantities of winter snow and rain that provide the basis for natural summer pastures. Just to the west of the Zagros lies the Assyrian steppe, which has good winter pastures but is hot and dry in summer. In prehistoric times, hunters followed wild animals in seasonal migrations between these two areas; now herders drive their animals from winter pastures on the Assyrian steppe to summer ones in the valleys of the Zagros. A similar situation occurs in Morocco where pastoralists graze their animals on the steppe lands on the northern edge of the Sahara Desert in winter and then move up to pastures in the valleys of the Atlas Mountains in summer.

In these areas and in other places where such a juxtaposition of lowland and highland pastures occurs, nomadic pastoralists interact with sedentary agriculturalists with whom they maintain strong social, economic, and cultural ties. Each group specializes in exploiting only one part of the total environment. In the Zagros since ancient times, pastoralists have used the higher and drier valleys that are not conducive to agriculture while farmers have exploited the broader valleys that receive more annual rainfall. Similarly, on the Assyrian steppe the pastoralists use those areas that are too salty to support agriculture while the richer areas are farmed.

The conditions that underlie nomadic pastoralism in the vast deserts of the Middle East are different. Seasonal migrations occur, but instead of moving vertically from lowland winter to highland summer pastures, the pattern of movement is horizontal, from permanent sources of water in summer to fall, winter, and spring pastures. The crucial factor under these conditions is not the availability of complementary zones but the need of certain animals to drink regularly and often only during the hot summers but not during the cooler seasons. Such, of course, are the characteristics of that specially adapted animal, the camel. The ability of camels to survive without drinking for long periods is not due so much to their proverbial ability to store up large quantities of water as to their “cooling system,” which allows them to withstand high degrees of heat with a minimum expenditure of liquids. In the deserts of Arabia, camels drink once every four days during the summer, about once every week or ten days during the fall and spring, and sometimes only once a month or every six weeks during the winter, depending on the temperature and the availability of fresh winter grasses rich in moisture. Some varieties of sheep and goat have a similar ability to forego water, but not to the same extent as camels.

Not everywhere does nomadic pastoralism represent the optimal pattern of land use, now or in earlier years. Throughout North Africa, for example, Arab nomads during the eleventh century A.D. destroyed much of the irrigation works established by the Romans and maintained by the urban Arabs following the Islamic conquests in the seventh century. The well-watered Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were occupied during the nomadic invasions by Arab tribes who concentrated mainly on pastoralism rather than continuing the highly productive agricultural activities of the former occupants. Only in this century has much of this land been returned to agriculture. At other periods of history, nomadic pas-toralists have similarly interfered with agriculture. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nomadic tribes gained considerable de facto power throughout Syria, where they consistently threatened trade and commerce as well as agriculture by demanding special payments for “protection.” Indeed, one scholar (Issawi 1969:105) attributes the rise in urban population during this period mainly to the upheaval and instability wreaked in rural areas by nomadic pastoralists.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, however, nomads throughout the area have consistently been declining in importance relative to the sedentary population. Political as well as economic factors, both internal and external, have caused a decline of nomadic pastoralism and in the importance of tribes in the socio-political structure. This process of change has been both subtle and violent but always complex. In many instances— in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Palestine—it has been much complicated by settler colonialism. Those areas that escaped large-scale European settlement have nonetheless suffered from the meddling of European imperialists in internal tribal affairs which they seldom understood.

In recent decades, the discovery of oil and the vast riches it has created seem to have sounded the death knell for nomadic pastoralism as an important way of life in any significant part of the Middle East. The contemporary ideology of the governments and of the urban masses is strongly against the continuation of nomadism, which is regarded as contrary to the goals and aspirations of a modern nation and society.

Although large-scale industrialization must eventually result in basic alterations in the subsistence-oriented economies of both nomadic pastoralists and sedentary farmers, we should be cautious in juxtaposing these two sectors. They do have contrastingly different life styles and have often been in conflict over political control of much of the Middle East, but an overall ecological perspective of the region shows a gradation of specializations that reflects attempts to exploit the total environment and to leave no part of it unused.

While the physical boundary between the desert and the sown is strikingly sharp in the Middle East—one can often stand with one foot in a rich agricultural land and the other in the desert— the boundary between nomadic pastoralist and sedentary farmer is less precise. Except in those areas that receive adequate rainfall, the limit of agriculture is directly tied to how far irrigation water can be extended into the desert. Different types of pastoralism and different degrees of nomadism occur, depending on whether the pastoralists operate mainly close to agricultural centers or deep within the desert. Some pastoralists operate on the edge of the desert and play important roles in the agricultural sector. Many of these are associated with the herding of sheep and goats. Others operate deep within the desert, far from agricultural centers, and seldom interact with agriculturalists. Most of these are traditionally associated with the herding of camels. There is thus a continuum that runs the gamut from sedentary agriculturalists through transhumant agriculturalists, semisedentary pastoralists, and pastoralists who also engage in some agriculture to full-time nomadic pastoralists. Nonpastoral nomads, such as gypsies, also contribute to the variety of peoples in the Middle East.

Intricately complex patterns of economic interaction exist between the sedentary and nomadic populations. Nomads pasture their animals on the stubble of the fields after harvest and in the process contribute manure to the fields. Many of the nomads who operate near agricultural centers play important roles in transporting crops, since they own the major beast of burden in the Middle East, the camel. Many sedentary people own animals which they entrust to nomads who graze them on the rich desert grasses and shrubs. Similarly, nomads often own palm trees or agricultural plots which they entrust to the care of agricultural specialists in return for a part of the harvest. The warrior nomads who most often frequent the innermost reaches of the desert guarantee the protection of both sedentary farmer and semisedentary pastoralist against attack or exploitation by other nomads. Thus both groups, nomads and sedentaries, depend on the products and services of each other. Although each group likes to think of itself apart and contrasts its way of life with that of the other group, all are organized in a single economic system geared to the utilization of all the resources, agricultural and pastoral, of the total environment. Consequently, any attempts at modernization which lead to the sedentarization of the nomads must result in the loss of what has been a highly productive part of the total resources of the Middle East.

The Āl Murrah

The Āl Murrah, who are the subject of this book, are an Arab (or Bedouin) tribe who exploit the deserts of the southeastern and eastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Although no census has been made of them, they probably number about 15,000 people. They divide themselves into a number of different patrilineal descent groups. The most basic unit of their society is the patrilocal household composed of an old man and old woman, their sons and their sons’ wives, and their children. Households average about seven people. Above the level of the household is the lineage which includes all the people descended from a male ancestor who lived about five generations ago; a lineage averages about fifty households. From four to six lineages unite, according to the patterns of partrilineal descent, to for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Content Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Environment
• 3. The Household, Marriage, and Family Life
• 4. Segmentation and the Lineage, Clan, and Tribe
• 5. The Āl Murrah and The Wider Society
• 6. Religion and the World of Islam
• 7. The Āl Murrah and The Modern World
• Bibliography
• Suggested Further Reading
• Glossary
• Index